I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time — no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding. I know that. Even if I knew [...]
Each place you go, don’t look for the thing that is different. Look for the thing that is the same. That is your starting point, the anchor. I can share the experience. We aren’t alone. But we can’t find each other inside all the noise. We have to look out into the quiet, strip the [...]
An old tree came down at the edge of the property in a windstorm. It sat below the cottage at the edge of the farm road. The base was massive and marred with water bumps, knocks and scars. Time had thinned out the top, making it appear foreshortened against the sky. The trunks and branches [...]
Here’s how I work: I’ve got a long project underway that takes focus and energy. To keep my mind limber and my imagination at play, I explore distractions in short bursts. I’ll write a story, mull an idea, research a set of images or some idle question. These are amusements. All the while, I’ve got [...]
The clues are everywhere, but it isn’t until you see the title that the entire meaning becomes clear. I stumbled across these paintings because I follow the artist on Twitter. Her handle is @julia_hensley. I don’t follow her because she’s an artist; a writer that I follow follows her and I added her as I [...]
They stopped us at the bottom of the jetway. We were the first ones to board, had scanned our tickets and paced down the carpeted walkway with the peculiar metronomic intensity of regular travelers. They weren’t ready for us. We were a motley gathering: a tall, thin woman with a pinched face reading a faded [...]
What do you make of a moment when you realize the you are a super-structure, or an outcropping, and that the foundations that you relied on blindly aren’t squarely placed on earth, but are adjunct and extraneous? We are seduced by the fragile beauty of these images when we encounter them: beach cottages on stilts, [...]
Every Sunday, the young man who wanted to be a writer went out early to the corner newsstand to buy The New York Times. He had a routine. Shuffle and deal, like a casino hand: sports section, arts section, week in review, and last, because it would get the most time and consideration, the Book [...]
From 1901 to 1964, the majority of the stone circle was restored in a series of makeovers which have left it, in the words of one archaeologist, as ‘a product of the 20th century heritage industry’. Another lesson in context and intervention: the monument at Stonehenge is more replica than artifact. You can get the [...]
The painting is Olympia by Edouard Manet. In 1865, it was pilloried by people of good sense as depraved and immoral. A journalist wrote: If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration. Years later, Manet’s painting has been pegged as the [...]